Terminal surgiries

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I feel like Lupin probably has been secretly hired to run one of the circles of hell.

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Dear OP;

You posted a thread to discuss a serious topic. Instead you have stumbled on quite an amazing, but different discovery: anyone who goes to vet school apparently turns insane (and regresses to an elementary school maturity level as well?). Please forgive these posters, they know not what they do. Have mercy on their poor deluded souls.
 
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Dear OP;

You posted a thread to discuss a serious topic. Instead you have stumbled on quite an amazing, but different discovery: anyone who goes to vet school apparently turns insane (and regresses to an elementary school maturity level as well?). Please forgive these posters, they know not what they do. Have mercy on their poor deluded souls.

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So I stumbled upon this lovely site and I thought I would post part of the commentary and the URL. All I kept thinking as I read this is ummm.... no.... but I do not attend Texas A&M. Although I am familiar with terminal surgeries at vet school and they do not euthanize people's personal pets to learn surgical techniques.

This is diretly from the website (http://www.dyingtolearn.org/animalUse.html):

Terminal Surgery LabsSome veterinary students, who are learning how to care for and save animal lives, are required to kill healthy animals as part of their education.Dogs who may once have been people’s pets continue to be killed by veterinary students in terminal surgery labs, even though there are effective surgery alternatives30 to replace these labs (See Appendix B.1.). Many veterinary students are surprised to learn that they are required to kill otherwise healthy dogs in order to learn to save the lives of other dogs. Procedures involved in terminal labs include euthanizing a healthy dog after he is used for teaching surgical procedures under anesthesia. Such labs are part of the core curricula or elective courses at various schools of veterinary medicine. For example, at Texas A&M University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, students are currently taught emergency veterinary procedures in a laboratory on how to save animal lives. The dogs’ chests are cut open, and the students squeeze their beating hearts while euthanasia solution is injected into their veins. The procedure is intended to teach the students how to resuscitate a dying dog31. Unfortunately, these dogs do not recover. When animals are killed in surgery labs, students also miss out on the opportunity to learn post-operative care, including pain management, supportive care, assessing the healing process, etc. Such skills can be gained working with actual animal patients and are just as important as learning surgical procedures.
 
Does anyone know which schools still perform terminal surgeries? I attended an interview at Iowa this weekend and was disappointed to hear that they do terminal surgeries. It kind of put a damper on my interest in that school. I was wondering if there is a list anywhere or if people could list the schools that still perform them? Thanks

There are ways to get around the terminal surgeries at Iowa State - there were a couple of kids in my class who petitioned the administration and got them to allow spay/neuter surgeries in place of the terminal surgeries everyone else was doing. In other words, during surgery lab, while most were performing, let's say, intestinal resection and anastomoses, those two kids would be doing large dog spays for instance. And, just to be clear, no terminal surgeries are ever allowed to wake up from anesthesia. They are euthanized while they are still anesthetized, so if the student anesthesiologists are doing their jobs correctly, there should not be any suffering. And the dogs used were scheduled to be euthanized at an animal shelter anyway. They were not purpose bred for terminal surgeries. Also, if a vet student fell in love with one of the animals, they could decide to either neuter or spay it instead of doing the terminal surgery and adopt it if they chose. One of my friends did this :)
 
Since this thread was bumped...At ISU they've added an additional lab section that you can take instead of the traditional surgery lab. In the alternative lab group you aren't required to do terminal surgeries. I don't believe you have to petition to take this--just email the instructor saying you want to be in that class. They still strongly recommend that you take the traditional lab for the benefit of experience with different surgical procedures.
 
Yeah, I went to school in the late 1990's there, so my info is a little dated. But they were amenable to those wishing to avoid terminal surgeries even then.
 
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